Following the success of the Desktop Summit in 2009 and separate events in 2010, Akademy and Guadec will again meet in a combined event in 2011. Organizers are now looking for a venue.

The Gnome Foundation and KDE e.V have praised the 2009 Gran Canary desktop Summit as a great success. After an intermezzo with separate events this year, the communities are looking for a host for another joint annual conference in 2011, announced yesterday.

The two desktop giants may have shared the same venue for GCDS 2009, the two events were held separately. This will change, and be better in 2011. According to Vincent Untz, board member at Gnome, collaboration between the parties is to be extended and a common program decided. "We enjoyed working with our KDE friends at GCDS in 2009, and want to increase our cooperation in 2011. We plan to go beyond simple co-location this time, and actually plan a combined schedule in 2011 so that KDE and GNOME contributors have every opportunity to work with and learn from each other."

KDE e.V and Gnome are now looking for a suitable European venue, big enough and with the necessary infrastructure to accommodate around 1000 participants. Applications must be entered by May 15, 2010. Details of requirements can be found on the KDE homepage (Akademy) and at the Gnome page, (Guadec).

This year the main conferences with KDE and Gnome will be held separately, starting with Akademy from July 3 to 10 in Tampere (Finland) and Guadec in Holland's The Hague, (July 24 to 30).

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In July this year, the KDE community conference (Akademy) and the Gnome Users and Developers' Conference (GUADEC) will for the first time be co-located on the Spanish Canary Islands. Registration for the event has already opened and KDE is calling for presentation submissions.

The first joint conference with KDE and Gnome is set to kick off on July 3rd on the island vacation destination Grand Canary. Richard Stallman is expected to attend for the opening of Guadec and Akademy.

The purpose of the Desktop summit on Gran Canaria is not only to improve cooperation and collaboration between the Gnome and KDE developers. As every year, a select few KDE developers will receive the project specific Akademy Award. We will introduce the winners.

Comments

Desktop Summit

Judy Bragg

I read somewhere that more than 850 contributors to the GNOME and KDE projects gathered in Gran Canaria last July. The event brought together attendees from 50 countries, and helped raise local awareness of free software and had a measurable impact on the local community. The impact of the event continues to be felt even after the event, with nearly 2 million hits to the summit Web site following the event. That is really impressive!